Over the past several years, cell phones, smartphones in particular, have made great advances in terms of their computational power and the complexity of the electronics they employ. They have also undergone some significant physical design changes that are driven by both the aesthetic goals of the product designers and the ability to shrink the necessary electronics to ever smaller sizes. These physical changes may result not only in a device with a more pleasing appearance, but which is also quite delicate and can be damaged easily. So it is often necessary to protect a portable electronic device by utilizing a protecting case.
Presently, a wide variety of portable electronic device protective cases are available in the market. These cases may have only marginal protective utility but provide some other feature such as an appearance that the user of the device believes to be more pleasing. The conventional protective cases of the smartphones may be made of flexible material such as leather that would be tailored to closely conform to the phone. This type of protective case offers several advantages when compared to rigid protective cases in that they allow some flexibility with regard to the precise physical dimensions and shape of the phone. Further, these cases can often be used with more than one model of phone.
However, the conventional flexible protective cases make the process of using the phone more cumbersome and may significantly detract from the appearance of the device. Therefore there is a need of an improved case for protecting the portable electronic device. More importantly the case could also be used as a device to protect the user from violent or non-violent attack while in use. The needed device would be a rigid case which may be made of substantially rigid material such as thermoplastic. Further, such a device would have an ability to create a single rigid physical unit comprised of the phone and case.
This needed device would be one of a category of devices integrating functional accessories of the device with the phone itself resulting in a single unit that the user can treat as a single device. Such devices might have the ability to communicate with the portable electronic devices they protect and transfer data and energy between them. The immediate needed device would have at least one input which would activate and/or deactivate the features of the device corresponding to an external input. Moreover, the device would have at least one sound and/or light emitting device arranged inside of it to generate a high volume of sound and/or light to deter violent and/or nonviolent attack against a user by attracting attention from the public in order to receive help.